Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(51)

“I did not like it,” he said.

“I think they got that.”

“I was not trying to offend them.”

“I don’t think they got that.”

“It was not like my mother’s,” he said. “I knew it wouldn’t be. I told you so. I did not ask anyone to do this for me.”

“Sometimes,” Farooq-Lane said, feeling her temper playing round the edges again, “people still try, even if they don’t think a thing will work. Sometimes there are nice surprises in this world, Parsifal.”

He sat just as he had in the café, straight up, box on his lap, looking straight ahead at the dark lot. His jaw was set. Eventually, he said, “She would make it every single month on the first day, always from the same recipe, and she would freeze it, so that I could thaw it and have a piece every single day for breakfast.”

“Every day?”

“Every day. If something always works, why would you change it?”

They sat in the dimming gray evening there, the car chilly and smelling of toasted almonds and sweet, yeasty cake. She didn’t know where they were going to go next. After the cul-de-sac failure, Parsifal had been unwilling to brainstorm about anything else he might have experienced in his vision. Morale was low for everyone involved. Farooq-Lane. Parsifal. The bullet-ridden rental.

“Do you have the recipe?” she asked. “Your mother’s? Can I ask her? Or someone who speaks German? Can you ask her?” It occurred to her only after she asked this that she had not seen Parsifal call or text anyone since she had been with him. She hadn’t seen him do anything with his phone but use it to play his ever-present opera.

Parsifal looked out the side window at the closed pastry shop, holding very, very still.

“She’s dead,” he said, in his stiff, affectless way. “I killed them all the first time I saw the end of the world.”





32

Most people pretended not to notice the woman at the gas station. The gas station, about thirty minutes west of Washington, DC, was one of those interstate oases common on the eastern corridor, always busy because of strong branding promising sandwiches that didn’t smell bad and toilets you wouldn’t stick to. The woman was lovely, with pale skin and long red hair, and she was clean, with a nice trench coat over a pretty flowered dress, but she looked lost—not in space, but in time—and that meant that no one could meet her eyes.

Shawna Wells had been watching the woman for the past twenty minutes. Shawna was waiting for her husband, Darren, to stop sulking and return to his new truck, parked beside her, so that they could continue their caravan back home to Gaithersburg. Possibly he was waiting for her to stop sulking. She couldn’t tell, and in any case, she wasn’t going to leave the van to get him. She had two occupied car seats in the back, in case he had forgotten, and she was not about to unbuckle them just to end a quarrel.

She watched the woman instead. At first Shawna thought the woman was asking for money, but the longer she watched, the more she thought that she was instead trying to hitch a ride. What woman hitches a ride these days? she wondered. Wasn’t every woman told it was dangerous to get into a stranger’s car? After a while, though, Shawna realized her question had morphed into a different one—What kind of woman takes on a hitchhiker?—and she also realized that she was about to ask the woman which direction she was headed.

The quarrel between Darren and Shawna had been about whether or not Shawna was selfish to be angry about him purchasing the new truck for himself. She’d wanted a new deck for parties. He’d wanted the new Raptor for his commute. She hardly saw how that made her selfish. He said that was the point.

She decided that if the woman asked her before Darren returned, she would say yes.

As minutes dragged on, however, and it seemed increasingly likely that Darren would soon give in, she grew impulsive. She put the van in gear. The children muttered. As she pulled out of the spot, she saw both Darren and the woman look up. The first in confusion, and the woman in something like recognition.

Shawna rolled down the window. The old van didn’t always work quite right, so the window stopped halfway, but that was enough to ask, “Are you looking for a ride?”

The woman was very lovely up close, with green-glass eyes and a coral-colored mouth and freckles all across her translucent skin. Sometimes looking at a beautiful woman can make another woman feel self-conscious about her appearance, but Shawna felt the opposite—she was suffused with a new awareness of the things about her body that she found beautiful.

“I’m trying to get to Washington, DC,” the woman said.

“I’m going that way.” Shawna darted a glance to Darren, who was watching with bewilderment. “Hop in.”

The woman smiled then, and Shawna remembered even more things that she liked about herself—her eyes, for instance, always looked like she was happy, even if she wasn’t laughing, and Darren sometimes said that just looking at them made him happy, too. He really wasn’t a dirtbag, most of the time, shame about that truck.

The woman got in.

Shawna held Darren’s gaze for a second (he was making the universal gesture for What the hell are you doing, Shawna?) before heading out of the station.

“I’m grateful,” the woman said.

“No problem,” Shawna replied, as if she did this all the time. Her phone, attached to a holder by the radio, was buzzing rapidly with texts. What are you doing? Another buzz. You have our children in the car. “What’s your name?” ’